#8 Milica Markovic | How a single Google Sheet can fuel your whole CRM automation

Welcome to Inside CRM, the podcast where we explore together the tools, trends and tactics to improve our customer relationship management. I'm Jessica Janssen, the host, but also CRM expert myself, with over a decade of experience. In each episode, CRM professionals join us to share their knowledge, to sharpen our CRM skills. Let's get started.

Yeah, we are doing it now. Here. Here is my hero to the rescue. So, background. Normally someone else would have been here, but he got sick. So you came in at 6 and I was like, I have this problem. I'm missing one person, one content, and she is just jumping in casually. We will do chat and maybe start with your intro.

Awesome. So, yeah, I'm Melitsa. I. I'm from Belgrade, but I live in Berlin since seven years and I've been working in smav, which is a loan comparison portal, doing all the omnichannel stuff that goes into it, implementation of the tools, et cetera, acting product owner at the time. And now I'm in Karthale Fehran, Swansea. We sell car parts. So not the most fun product ever. But from a CRM perspective, it's a very interesting problem to have on your hands because you have 5 million products and now you figure out personalization and how that's going to look like. So what we've done, and that's what Jessica and I were discussing, we can talk a little bit about marketing automation and how we got there. Even though she has no background, I'm going to explain it right.

But it's also a crazy journey because she explained it to me already once and it was really impressive. It also felt a bit like a really structured and complex setup that you have.

Yeah, I don't think it's. I think I read somewhere that one of the greatest assets that's going to be for us all in management, the most valuable asset we would have is to simplify the complex issues. Right. So you can build something incredibly difficult, but there is no use. And this is a good intro because I wrote down the note. So I have a team and we have a rule. And when we started working on marketing automation, I told them that currently you're doing 80% of boring stuff. A nice introduction, but it's needed and you have 20% of the to do cool stuff. If you do cool stuff in a right way, as in release as much marketing automation as possible, you will have more stuff, more time for cool stuff, and you will reduce the boring stuff. So that's one principle. And the other principle is see message as a Code, not as a design. Imagine it like SQL or it is HTML and css, but imagine it like a set of codes and it's a text. And in the text you can embed stuff and you can take out stuff. When we change from email, for example, because email is the most complex one, when we change it from this is banner and then there is copy and then there is a button and then there is this color and that color, but what's in the background? And we actually managed to create like a full automation. And we are talking, I don't know, 30 segmentations, different channels, email, SMS, push notification in app message, et cetera. So we've done three things and you can, if you've done that, challenge me please on this one. So we've built like a Google Doc. No, I'm good. Wave in. So we took, I wrote it here, but maybe someday I will prepare slides and you can go into details. Right? But we took one part of the template is everything that comes from brand and the content that comes in. So we are talking banner, we are talking copy, everything that is done on weekly level. For that part, we provided a Google Doc for Brand with the exact structure that we need. And every field in that template is connected in that template for brand is connected directly and mapped into a master template that we have in our tool. And then the second pillar of it is all the other elements you have within the templates. Right. So we are talking USPs, we are talking delivery, we are talking all these other extra stuff. So we built an asset farm and we have hundreds of elements that are directly mapped into the design elements of the master template. So we can turn them on and off by selecting them in that Google Doc that we provided, the automatic one.

And how do you connect the Google Sheet with the tool?

We have the Google Sheet that is being exported into CSV and then uploaded from CSV and that's it. You don't touch a thing. So the third thing is the recommendation. So you turn on an element, that element in background in the tool has already all the fields connected to the recommendation center, which is upsell, cross sell, last, see seasonal stuff and whatever you want to do. So basically this Google Doc will, beside element 1-257-15, upload it, connect it to the segments, because you're able to in Google Doc to basically say these are the segments that I have. This is the copy, this is the banner, this is the voucher code. You have standardized tracking. You download the CSV, you upload it in not even a Joke. You upload it into a tool and then you spend a couple of hours just testing if everything works. Maybe a couple of hours. Because you want to get the feedback from customer care and stuff. Because selling car parts is not easy for us non car part people. And that's it. And if you have a tracking, then you have in GA and then in Tableau on a segment level, all the clicks, all the opens, everything, all the conversions and now we just do cool stuff.

How many Google Sheets do you have?

We have one.

This is all 17 tips.

I'm lying, right? It's two. Yeah, one. One Google sheet. One Google sheet is the one that we provide for brand and pricing. And they're filling in the voucher code, the brand. And the second one is the Asset Farm. And Asset Farm, I don't know if you have that concept. It's about centralized. If we ever do this I can put on the slides, right? But it's like a centralized database of all the. It's called, it's basically, it's a Google Doc and it has. This is the headline, this is the copy, this is what's in the cta and this is an image that goes with it. Those like are filling in the elements.

But also the tracking the segments. So you're also controlling it via that, right?

Yes, we have these master templates. It took us years to get there, guys. It's not like we came out brilliantly. It's like trial and error. I do CRM for many years. So yeah, you have two actually. The one that is an asset farm, you just add when you have something new, like you change something about the delivery, you add that information, edit that information, but that remains, once you build it, it remains stable. And that's as I said, it can be about some categories, it can be about some products that you want to push. It can be a catalog of products that you can push as a recommendation. Because everyone thinks recommendation engine has to be the smartest thing ever made. But you can fake it.

How do you fake it?

How do you fake it? Easily. You go to pricing and you tell them, give me the list of top hundred products. Discount of 20% because it's stupid to show €1 discount, right? Yeah. So they send us that and then we pick this one works. This one doesn't work. We put in that same Asset Farm Doc. Right. We have automation for that. We put into the same Google Doc we put those products. It automatically populates events like elements. It just ships out. And you can do it also on a segment level. So you can say this is the product portfolio for segment one, segment two. It's essentially think about CRM. If I'm like, it's very confusing because this is not a structured presentation, it's an improvisation. But if you think about every message that you send out, it works for push notification, it works for SMS, it works for everything. We use ChatGPT to push in the content because we were bored, we wanted to try it. I would say if you think about it as a piece of code, that's the first important thing and you can take in and out anything from it. And the other thing is you find the way to centralize as much and reuse as much, you're going to end up in very automated flow that is easy to maintain. It depends on who writes your copy though. I don't know, do you guys all write copy internally or do you have copywriters in other teams, like in brands or something? You have it in brand? Yeah. So imagine that you become a product team. Actually we lead CRM as a product team, not as a marketing team.

But why was it necessary to set up the Google sheets? Normally you would.

That's the way the tool works. The tool is bloom rich.

But it's so interesting how that works.

And it has to be the most.

Impressive sheet I've ever seen.

It works on CSV. It's awesome. So we faked it till we made it in Marketo as well. So we played with Marketo. We previously used Marketo in Smava. So there were times when we were testing the upsell and we didn't have recommendations. So we created the business logic. We went to bi, they put it into Tableau. So Tableau was running the recommendations. Not even a joke. We would download that and put it before Marketo into what was it? Optimo. Then it became Episerver. So Episerver was run only on the manual list. We did it with Episerver. If you imagine everything is Excel, like it's code and it's a Vlookup Excel, easy. Just apply the principle and you will eventually get there. Because recommendation engine is essentially any machine learning. Like it's a very buzz of a word, right? But any machine learning is very capable Vlookup, like incredibly capable Excel. In Marketo they called me the feature abuser. If you understand how something works and what it does, you can reuse it for whatever your use case actually is.

Do you have scaling problems with that? What is the performance of the setup.

How many segments you want to have? Right. So we are achieving one on one personalization. Back in Smava we had 1.5 billion combinations in one template that would go out. Why? Because we had recommendation logic that was easy. Because you can have loans from 0 from 1,000 to 120,000. So your upsell and cross sell are definite. Right. And here we have full personalization. Because the way that people think about one on one personalization is that you must have an engine that is going to run somewhere and recommend something to you. But in fact a lot of customers are the same and they behave exactly the same. So if you do smart enough segmentation in terms of clustering, in terms of behavior, in terms of some user characteristics, essentially what my approach was like, what if we had five different segmentations that each have 10 different segments inside and then what are the parts that I personalize which can be done one by one. So in car parts, if I'm driving Toyota and the last thing I searched was this particular product displaying that category or a product within a template is already one on one personalization. And if you have based on these five different segmentation, if every element is adjusted to your own segment, that means that you are going to have that many options, right? So it's five segmentations and 10 segments. So it's five on 10th. On 10th. On 10th. On 10th. It's insane. It can work quite cool. So don't be thinking about the most complicated solutions. I would rather say think about the simplest way to push a decision to push that information through and then you're easy.

Have you now increased the time that you spend on the cool stuff? Because you were saying in the beginning. 80, 20.

Yeah. My team has a four hour meeting on Fridays without me and they're talking about cool stuff and then they come up with all these ideas and then they come back to me on Monday or Thursday. Because we have, as I said, we function as a product team. So we have the standups and we have the standardized ceremonies. They come to me and they're like, we've discussed, we want to try this out. Or even it happens. Oh, we are in Azure Fix. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I ran a contextual personalization test last week. Okay, what was it about? And then they show you these things because they feel very much. I made a mistake in my previous company, right. And I was not a good lead. I had to learn how to be a good lead and how to motivate people to actually love what they do. And what I learned with my team is that they like to play. We all have children in us so they have full freedom to try out things as long as they are not very negative on the revenue. So I even am like, you can try it out. It's not going to work and we're going to lose some money. But if you can find a way for us to win that money back, that's a win. Because you remember your first campaign where you failed. I remember mine. I lost money.

Of course, we own it.

Exactly. You lose money. It's not like I lost revenue. It was magazine gave away money. I was like, I was not bad. I was worse than that. And I cried. I was so scared. I lost, like, in Serbian money, we're talking €3,000. So it's funny, but I remember how scared I was and how horrible it felt. But then I was making millions for the same company, like couple of months later. So it's always a gamble if you don't test and if you don't try and if you don't fail, and everyone's saying fail fast, you don't have to be stupid, but trying out things makes sense.

So what fun stuff are they working on currently?

So there is this contextual personalization that they've released behind my back, which I support. I was not pissed. And that's very cool because the whole abandoned journey, abandoned card journey for us, looks very different than it does for the rest of the companies. Usually it's one email that shoots out. They're like, we're going to make this a journey and it's going to be omnichannel and it's going to be everywhere and it's going to be awesome. So we have in each one of these nodes now the team implemented three different templates. And so the engine based on customers behavior and clustering of the customers. So there is Bloom Rich is a smart tool as well. So it's able to choose A, B or C and we don't control it. And you don't have a winner because a winner is every one of these templates. It works for some group. Yeah. So basically the third thing is there is no such thing as control in personalization. You have to give up control and that's fine. Mistakes will happen and that's how you will learn. Yeah, they do that. They do personalization. They did ChatGPT versus Editor's Desk, which editors didn't like because ChatGPT won every single time. We don't know how. So we upload a little bit of data inside, like what's the open rate, click rate, stuff like that. Then you will get, based on that performance and behavior, you will get some recommendations. Then we check if that makes sense. And then they might just went, tested it, implemented it, it's happening. Additional customer journeys. They're like, oh, I was thinking I would like to send out an email on this node in customer journey. It just makes sense. And you spoke about that, which is very cool. We have the whole journey mapped out and then team looks at that journey on these four hours without me.

I would love to attend this meeting.

What are they talking about? I always have a question about you. Yeah, they're like, oh, that reward, they're super sweet. Super sweet. But yeah, so they map out the customer. We have mapped out the customer journey. We already put in some ideas. They get go back to the customer journey because this is where the truth is. And then they're like, maybe we can try out sending here an email. Like after the second purchase, like after the first purchase, do we push them immediately to buy a second product? Why not? And then we beg them buy another one. It's going to be awesome. And you do all of these things, right? The way that you get consent, like I have some tips for you if you want to. The way that you get consent, sometimes you need to be very sneaky about these things, right? Not illegal, but sneaky. And they also deal with those topics. They're like, how do we get the customers who are running out of consent by the legal ways to reconfirm their consent. So then you will send an email, hey, you're about to get out of consent. But if you want this discount and this, then you are going to get and confirm the consent. We are going to give you this massive discount for the next purchase. And then they're like, yeah, sure, give me emails. But at the end, customers, we have 70% returning customers on the company level and we see that a customer who has a consent is more than two times more valuable in CLV than the customer. Without consent, there is no discussion. Companies are underestimating CRM. There is no paid marketing without CRM. There is no commercial without CRM. There is no scaling and growth without CRM being profitable. Yeah, this is what we do. We just play around, release stuff. That's it.

You mentioned actually the topic CRM is underestimated. And I sometimes also hear this discussion that you have a global control group to prove the impact of CRM. What's your experience there? Did you have to prove it in such a way? How did you set it up if you did that?

I had to prove it so many times it's even sad. Yeah, we were just talking about it. You're paying for a tool for CRM for the whole year, the half of a monthly budget for performance. Usually that's the count in the company. And yet you have to prove that CRM works. Right. And that segmentations work and all of that. And we don't have a global test group because we compare to the non consent people. So it's very clear when you compare these two groups, every test that we run against of course the control group. So you have to test it and test it again and you have to prove it and prove it all over again. And that sucks. Yeah, to be honest, sometimes you feel very misunderstood in companies. But to be honest, our time is coming. It's true. Because the acquisition costs are so high, Google is now an automation, essentially the customer retaining a customer. Maintaining a good relationship with customer will always be a king. So I see chief customer officers in next couple of years popping up left and right and doing these things. So just hold on. Don't change your career.

Should we stop it with this positive message? I feel like it's a perfect ending.

For.

Was so great to have you and that you took the spot and improvised totally. Thank you so much.

Thank you guys.

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